Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Rating:
Summary: loved it
Review: When I read Foxfire four years ago, I became a Joyce Carol Oates fanatic. That didn't change when I read it again just recently. Its appeal is the girl gang idea- about the power struggles that each of the five girls as they move through adolescence. Legs Sadowsky is a troubled young girl who brings four others together in ways they never thought possible. Oates has a marvelous way with words, in which you are horrified yet at the same time fascinated by all that happens. Legs makes for a marvelous, beautiful character in that way. The girls are brutal to one another, and harsh to an outside world, which has, in a way, rejected them. In the end, the girls have to make decisions about growing up that affect each other and, inevitably, the outside world. Its a sexy, sad, and thought-provoking book that I couldn't put down.

Rating:
Summary: passionate account of a girl gang
Review: Written in a passionate rush of often purply prose, "Foxfire" is the story of a girl gang which performed feminist acts before feminism was as taken for granted as it is now. Led by the charismatic and enigmatic Legs Savodsky, the group moves from vandalism and physical acts of aggression to kidnapping, this comes at the very end and is, as you might suspect, the end of the gang as well. Chronicled by the author's stand-in Maddy Wirtz, a former "good girl" who is going against (she tells us) the long ago warning not to tell anyone about Foxfire's affairs. But, as she says, who is around to stop her. Great book - and also 1996 movie worth searching out.